The Israeli Air Force allegedly carried out an airstrike on a building next to Iran’s embassy in Syria on Monday, reportedly killing at least six people including a top Iranian commander.
The strike in the Damascus-area municipality of Mezzeh hit a building adjacent to the Iranian embassy, footage showed.
Iran’s SSN news website said the targeted building was Iran’s consulate and ambassador’s residence.
A Reuters report said the consulate was “flattened,” in what it said was “a startling apparent escalation of conflict in the Middle East that would pit Israel against Iran and its allies.”
Iran’s Tasnim news agency cited sources who indicated that at least six people were killed in the strike. It said the number was not yet officially confirmed.
Among those killed in the strike was senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps official Mohammad Reza Zahedi, according to security sources speaking to Reuters and media reports in Iran.
Zahedi has been reported to be a top commander in IRGC’s Quds Force — responsible for the unit’s operations in Syria and Lebanon.
Footage from the scene showed that the targeted building had been destroyed in the strike. Next to the rubble, an Iranian flag was seen flying over the Iranian embassy.
Syria’s state-run SANA broadcaster claimed air defense systems had engaged the alleged Israeli attack, downing some of the missiles.
SANA said rescue authorities were working to extract dead and wounded people from under the rubble.
While Israel does not, as a rule, comment on specific strikes in Syria, it has admitted to conducting hundreds of sorties against Iran-backed terror groups attempting to gain a foothold in the country over the last decade. The Israeli military says it attacks arms shipments believed to be bound for those groups, chief among them Hezbollah. Additionally, airstrikes attributed to Israel have repeatedly targeted Syrian air defense systems.
Faced with ongoing attacks by the Iran-backed Hezbollah terror group and Shiite militias throughout the Middle East in the wake of Hamas’s brutal October 7 massacre, which sparked the ongoing war in Gaza, Israel has escalated its strikes on Iran-linked terror targets in Syria, killing numerous IRGC operatives, as well as members of Hezbollah and other Iranian proxy groups.
In December, senior IRGC officer Brig. Gen. Razi Mousavi was killed in an alleged Israeli airstrike in Damascus, drawing Iranian threats of retaliatory action.
Monday’s strike came hours after a drone launched by an Iran-backed militia in Iraq struck an Israeli Navy base in Israel’s southernmost city of Eilat, causing damage to a hangar.